Call for Participation
2020 NSF Cybersecurity Summit for Large Facilities and Cyberinfrastructure
September 22-24, 2020 ✶ Online Summit
Submissions should be sent to CFP@trustedci.org by Monday July 13th, 2020
(CLOSED) DEADLINE EXTENDED TO COB MONDAY JULY 13TH
It is our pleasure to announce that the 2020 NSF Cybersecurity Summit is scheduled to take place Tuesday, September 22 through Thursday the 24th. Due to the impact of the global pandemic, we will hold this year’s summit on-line instead of in-person as originally planned.
The final program is still evolving, but we will maintain the mission to provide a format designed to increase the NSF community’s understanding of cybersecurity strategies that strengthen trustworthy science: what data, processes, and systems are crucial to the scientific mission, what risks they face, and how to protect them.
About the Summit
Since 2004, the annual NSF Cybersecurity Summit has served as a valuable part of the process of securing the NSF scientific cyberinfrastructure by providing the community a forum for education, sharing experiences, building relationships, and establishing best practices.
The NSF cyberinfrastructure ecosystem presents an aggregate of complex cybersecurity needs (e.g., scientific data and instruments, unique computational and storage resources, complex collaborations) as compared to other organizations and sectors. This community has a unique opportunity to develop information security practices tailored to these needs, as well as break new ground on efficient, effective ways to protect information assets while supporting science. The Summit will bring together leaders in NSF cyberinfrastructure and cybersecurity to continue the processes initiated in 2013: building a trusting, collaborative community and seriously addressing that community’s core cybersecurity challenges.
The Summit seeks proposals for presentations, lightning talks and training sessions.
Proposing Content for the Summit
There are many ways to contribute to the Cybersecurity Summit. We are open to proposals for recorded training sessions, recorded or live plenary presentations and lightning talks. More specific information on each of those is available below. Submissions should be sent to CFP@trustedci.org by June 29th, 2020. Responses should go out by August 3rd, 2020 to ensure adequate planning time for presenters.
We strongly encourage proposals that address the 2019 Summit findings and recommendations:
Community member interaction and knowledge sharing remain a key to success. The value in developing and strengthening researcher / cybersecurity professional relationships was emphasized.
Workforce development continues to be important, with demonstrable success resulting from hands-on training opportunities.
The community values the availability of consistent, well defined, and measurable ways to validate that systems are being administered securely.
Measuring the effectiveness or impact of cybersecurity implementation, i.e., determining appropriate metrics to use, is a challenging, but important area of investigation.
Access control and credential management are extremely important to the community. The recommendation to use federated and/or external providers and industry standard protocols as much as possible was presented in several sessions.
Social engineering remains a significant threat to cybersecurity.
AI and ML can provide valuable cyberinfrastructure services but have an inherent vulnerability in the potential for incorporating misinformation into models.
Ensuring and maintaining data integrity is becoming an increasingly important issue. (This is Trusted CI’s annual challenge topic for 2020.)
As the number of organizations handling PII and medical data increases, implementation of HIPAA compliance is becoming more widespread.
Presentations related to the unique cybersecurity challenges surrounding COVID-19 in the research community are all welcomed.
Proposing a Plenary Presentation
Please submit brief white papers with a half page abstract focused on NSF Large Facilities’ unmet cybersecurity challenges, lessons learned, and/or significant successes for presentation during the Summit Plenary Session. White papers (and presentations) may be in the form of position papers and/or narratives and may be one to five pages in length. Please indicate if you are willing and able to pre-record your talk to minimize connectivity issues at your scheduled presentation time. For those talks that are pre-recorded, a live on-line question and answer service will be provided for the attendees and presenter. Plenary talks are limited to 30 minutes in length including time needed for question and answers if desired.
All accepted white papers will be included in the 2020 summit report. The Program Committee will select the most relevant, reasoned, and broadly interesting for presentation.
Submission deadline: July 13th, 2020
Submit to: CFP@trustedci.org
Word limit: 200 to 2000 words (~1-5 single spaced pages)
Notification of acceptance: August 3rd, 2020
Proposing a Training Session
Training may be targeted at technical and/or management audiences. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: cybersecurity planning and programs, risk assessment and management, regulatory compliance, identity and access management, data management and provenance, networks security and monitoring, secure coding and software assurance, physical security in the context of information security, and information security of scientific and emerging technologies. The Program Committee will select the most community-relevant and broadly interesting training sessions.
With the move to an on-line Summit, we’re accepting training sessions that can be well-presented in a non-interactive format (e.g. online videos). Pre-recorded training sessions will be made available on-demand to attendees prior to the event allowing them to experience them on their own schedule. Please include a summary of the training materials that will be provided to support the training session along with a half page abstract summarizing the training session.
Submission deadline: July 13th, 2020
Submit to: CFP@trustedci.org
Word Limit: 600 words
Notification of Acceptance: August 3rd, 2020
Information for Students
Each year the summit organizers invite several students to attend the Summit. Both undergraduate and graduate students may apply. No specific major or course of study required, as long as the student is interested in learning and applying cybersecurity innovations to future education or work experience.
Due to the Summit moving to a virtual format, we are offering access to all active students who apply (or until we reach our headcount limit).
More information and application can be found at: trustedci.org/2020-student-program
Notes for First-Time Presenters
The Summit organizers want to encourage those who have not presented at previous Summits to share their experiences, expertise, and insights with the NSF cybersecurity community. You don’t need to be perfectly polished, you just need to have something to share about your project or facility's experience with information security. Feedback from last year’s Summit showed that there was a great deal of interest in “lessons learned” type presentations from projects who’ve faced cybersecurity challenges and had to rethink some things afterwards. We’ve put together a page of tips and ideas for new presenters, including proposal and presentation tips as well as suggested topics. More direct coaching is available upon request.
So you want to present at the 2020 NSF Cybersecurity Summit…
Welcome! The Summit organizers wish to encourage and support participation from throughout the wider NSF community. To further that mission, we’ve provided some information (below) to aid in the preparation of CFP responses. Please don’t hesitate to direct questions to CFP@trustedci.org.
What to Present
The CFP presents an opportunity for the community to make progress on shared challenges identified in prior summits. The organizers especially appreciate proposals that drive this home; however, not every presentation, training session, or activity has to be centered around just that topic. Please submit any idea that you think may be relevant to our audience but note that proposals that address community challenges from prior years will be given higher preference.
We strongly encourage proposals that address the 2019 Summit findings and recommendations:
Community member interaction and knowledge share remain a key to success. The value in developing and strengthening researcher / cybersecurity professional relationships was emphasized.
Workforce development continues to be important, with demonstrable success resulting from hands-on training opportunities.
The community values the availability of consistent, well defined, and measurable ways to validate that systems are being administered securely.
Measuring the effectiveness or impact of cybersecurity implementation, i.e., determining appropriate metrics to use, is a challenging, but important, area of investigation.
Access control and credential management are extremely important to the community. The recommendation to use federated and/or external providers and industry standard protocols as much as possible was presented in several sessions.
Social engineering remains a significant threat to cybersecurity.
AI and ML can provide valuable cyberinfrastructure services, but have an inherent vulnerability in the potential for incorporating misinformation into models.
Ensuring and maintaining data integrity is becoming an increasingly important issue.
As the number of organizations handling PII and medical data increases, implementation
Presentations related to the unique cybersecurity challenges surrounding COVID-19 in the research community are also welcomed.
How to Build a CFP Response
The proposal you submit will be used in two ways: to tell the organizers about what you plan to present and to be included in the summit findings as a sort of after-action report. It should include:
An executive summary/abstract (short description of the topic and content).
Who the presenter(s) is/are.
Please indicate if you are able to provide a recording of your talk/training session in advance of the Summit. Plenary talks that are recorded will be streamed to attendees at a scheduled time during September 22-24 dates. For those talks that are pre-recorded, a live on-line question and answer session will be provided for attendees and the presenter to interact.
Either a whitepaper discussion of the topic or a narrative you’d like to share with the community. (For activities that are not trainings or plenary sessions, this may be replaced with a description of the planned activity and the activity’s intended audience.)
Contact information (preferably email) for the presenter(s) in case the organizers have any questions. This can be in a separate note in the email body instead of the proposal itself if presenter(s) don’t wish it to be published.
Expected length of the session/training/activity. Any relevant references (e.g. link to the home page for the project the talk is about or recommendations for further reading).
Our community has expressed in the past that many find it helpful if they can download a copy of a presentation’s slides. Therefore we will ask that all presenters submit their slides in advance of the summit.
The easiest way to get help/feedback from the organizing committee prior to submitting your final proposal is to create a Google Doc containing your proposal and sending an edit link to CFP@trustedci.org.
Tips for Presenting
There are many different presentation formats that can work well depending on the topic. Consider the following:
Lecture format: The presenter(s) talk to the audience and show slides to support their dialogue, then do a short Q&A session at the end of the presentation.
Panel format: 3-5 persons answer questions offered by a moderator on a specific topic or set of topics, then do a short Q&A with the audience. This tends to work out best when the panel contains people with very different backgrounds or viewpoints, and the moderator is good at keeping folks to the topic and time constraints.
Open Forum format: 2-3 persons answer questions offered by the audience. Works best if there is an extra person gathering questions and presenting them, and if the speakers can keep things succinct so that the presentation keeps moving and many questions get answered.
Lightning talk: A brief presentation on a relevant topic not to exceed more than 5 minutes.
Hands-on format: The presenter(s) walk the audience through a demo or tutorial as the audience follows along on their computers (or on paper, if the topic supports it).